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The author talks of "summarizing" but I think there's a deeper concept at play: compression. Human thoughts are compressed into speech. Many people probably sp

The author talks of "summarizing" but I think there's a deeper concept at play: compression. Human thoughts are compressed into speech. Many people probably speak only a tiny fraction of their thoughts. Writing is compressed speach, most people write only a fraction of what they say (unless you're a professional content producer/author/developer/etc). Entire worlds of thought are regularly compressed into writing. Poetry is often further compressed. It's trying to fit vast complexity into as few words as possible. Think how many words have been written trying to accurately decompress the full meanings in Hamlet, the Odyssey, or Beowulf. Tweets are compressed writing. Memes are compressed tweets. LLM can compress huge amounts of text into a few words. This is pretty remarkable, but it is only ever as good as the input. It's never creating, it's simply compressing concepts it is trained on. You can unlock parts of that compressed data with prompts. If my friend and I both shared the same LLM, I could send them a few words to use as a prompt, knowing that it will "expand" into paragraphs or even chapters of meaning already pre-compressed inside the LLM. I think this is possibly a new thing, imagine like HugeLol, Reddit, X.com, but instead of tweets and memes it's LLM prompts. We're able now more than ever to transmit complex concepts to each other with the smallest possible bits. I've seen this a bit already on some of the LocalLlama online groups. They'll post prompts to each other to produce a "personality" they can interact with. I suspect this will be more and more used to compress and send data to each other.

foobarian 3y ago
Reminds me of this old joke: A group of coworkers is commuting on the same train. To pass the time, they tell jokes. Over time, they told the same joke so many times they come up with a system to make things more efficient. One guy goes: "5!" Everybody roars with laughter. Another guy goes: "23!" Others are in tears. Third guy says: "15." No reaction. He repeats: "15!" Still nothing. He goes, "Come on guys 15 is a pretty funny joke!" "Well it is, you just don't know how to tell it!"
karmakaze 3y ago
> but instead of tweets and memes it's LLM prompts. We're able now more than ever to transmit complex concepts to each other with the smallest possible bits. This sounds like passing a URL-shortened link instead of the contents. That only works efficiently if both already know the contents. To (actually) communicate from one who knows to one who doesn't, sending a prompt is like a download link that the receiver will have to get and read. Also communicating involves drawing attention to particular aspects, would the prompt also cave out the right amount/shape of what you had in mind? An example would be explaining a point to someone who's not quite getting it, referring them to a full treatise on the topic may not be of help. AI's could get interactive though with the system learning what the person understands or doesn't and presenting analogies based on what they do know.
- thfuran 3y ago
  >To (actually) communicate from one who knows to one who doesn't, sending a prompt is like a download link that the receiver will have to get and read. And when they download it, it may turn it to be different than what you uploaded and sent a link to.
  - ukuina 3y ago
    This is solved with temperature control.
thfuran 3y ago
>Think how many words have been written trying to accurately decompress the full meanings in Hamlet, the Odyssey, or Beowulf. There's simply no way that more than a tiny fraction of the various meanings imputed by later literary analyses were actually intended by the authors. This is not a desirable property for a compression scheme.

foobarian 3y ago

Reminds me of this old joke: A group of coworkers is commuting on the same train. To pass the time, they tell jokes. Over time, they told the same joke so many times they come up with a system to make things more efficient. One guy goes: "5!" Everybody roars with laughter. Another guy goes: "23!" Others are in tears. Third guy says: "15." No reaction. He repeats: "15!" Still nothing. He goes, "Come on guys 15 is a pretty funny joke!" "Well it is, you just don't know how to tell it!"

karmakaze 3y ago

> but instead of tweets and memes it's LLM prompts. We're able now more than ever to transmit complex concepts to each other with the smallest possible bits. This sounds like passing a URL-shortened link instead of the contents. That only works efficiently if both already know the contents. To (actually) communicate from one who knows to one who doesn't, sending a prompt is like a download link that the receiver will have to get and read. Also communicating involves drawing attention to particular aspects, would the prompt also cave out the right amount/shape of what you had in mind? An example would be explaining a point to someone who's not quite getting it, referring them to a full treatise on the topic may not be of help. AI's could get interactive though with the system learning what the person understands or doesn't and presenting analogies based on what they do know.

thfuran 3y ago
>To (actually) communicate from one who knows to one who doesn't, sending a prompt is like a download link that the receiver will have to get and read. And when they download it, it may turn it to be different than what you uploaded and sent a link to.
- ukuina 3y ago
  This is solved with temperature control.

thfuran 3y ago

>Think how many words have been written trying to accurately decompress the full meanings in Hamlet, the Odyssey, or Beowulf. There's simply no way that more than a tiny fraction of the various meanings imputed by later literary analyses were actually intended by the authors. This is not a desirable property for a compression scheme.